India is the world’s largest film producer by annual volume. Domestic productions hold roughly 90% of the internal market — an extraordinarily rare phenomenon in a world where the overwhelming majority of national markets are dominated by American content.
In the streaming ecosystem, India ranks third among the largest content suppliers for platforms, behind only the United States and Japan. Its films circulate in more than 90 countries, and international revenues continue to grow.
This is not just about quantity. This is about strategic positioning in the global contest over narratives.
The real question is a different one: how did a Global South country, still facing significant structural inequalities and challenges, become a power capable of competing for symbolic value in an era defined by narrative wars, global platforms, and algorithmic colonization?
How did India build this strength? The answer begins before independence.
Hacking the system before being independent
In the 1920s, India was still a British colony. And yet cinema was already beginning to take shape as a system.
It was not a state-led project. It was not a planned cultural policy. It was industrial intelligence.
Exhibitors — in direct contact with audiences — studied the American model of vertically integrated production, distribution, and exhibition. They understood that power lay not merely in screening films, but in controlling the entire process.
They already dominated exhibition. They moved into production. They built distribution networks. And they grasped something even bolder for the time: the content produced there should not be confined to India’s borders.
As early as the 1920s, still under colonial rule, Indian producers and exhibitors began exporting their films to regions across Asia and Africa, leveraging existing cultural circuits and diasporas. India did not merely copy Hollywood — it understood the logic of the American system and adapted it to its own reality. It hacked the process. It turned a foreign industrial model into a tool of its own.
What could have remained colonial consumption began to convert into productive self-assertion.
The power of showing yourself
But there is an even deeper element in this story.
The strength of Indian cinema lies in the fact that it was never afraid to present itself as Indian.
Across much of the Global South, cinema oscillated between copying external models and softening its own cultural references to become “exportable.” India did the opposite. It built a cinema in which audiences recognize themselves.
Indian audiences see their own country on screen. They see the faces, the bodies, the gestures, the landscapes, the colors, the local conflicts, the cultural codes that belong to them. There is no dilution.
When sound film arrives in the early 1930s, this dimension grows even stronger. Despite British colonization, the majority of the population did not speak English — and had no reason to. The colonizer’s language was not the language of everyday life.
Foreign cinema, therefore, loses traction in India with the arrival of talkies. At that moment, the Indian industry consolidates its own language.
Music and dance become central not merely out of aesthetic tradition, but because they function as a unifying element in a multilingual country. Rather than adapting to the dominant language, Indian cinema uses its own cultural matrices to create a common idiom for the entire nation.
Speech ceases to be a barrier and performance becomes a bridge.
Late independence and mastery of 20th-century tools
India achieves independence in 1947, already in the postwar 20th century — the age of image, sound, and mass circulation.
Unlike the independences of the 18th and 19th centuries — organized around print and the press — Indian revolutionaries develop techniques of sovereignty struggle in the audiovisual field as well. Political independence finds a cultural industry already functioning and already projected beyond national borders.
This helps explain why cinema, innovation, and technology travel together in Indian history. The appropriation of modern tools occurs simultaneously with the struggles that found the republic.
Penetrating China: the Dangal case
The strength of Indian cinema is not confined to the domestic market.
The case of Dangal is emblematic. The film grossed approximately $303 million worldwide, with roughly $193 million coming from China alone — more than from the Indian market itself.
China is one of the most closed markets in the world, with rigid state control and strict limits on foreign title imports. Breaking in is no trivial feat.
Dangal’s success was not an accident. Actor Aamir Khan had already won over Chinese audiences with 3 Idiots, building prior symbolic capital. But this only works because the Indian cultural matrix remains intact.
India exports identity — and that identity crosses political borders.
Popular and auteur: a productive tension
The strength of the domestic market is concentrated primarily in popular cinema associated with Bollywood and the major regional industries. These are the films that sustain the system economically.
At the same time, there exists an auteur Indian cinema — sophisticated and politically relevant — with a constant presence at major international festivals: Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno. This cinema symbolically projects India onto the world stage, even if it lacks the same domestic force.
The challenge lies in reconciling these two poles. But this tension is structural in many national cinemas.
Structural overview of Indian cinema
India is the world’s largest film producer by annual volume, with roughly 90% of the domestic market held by national productions and a presence in more than 90 countries. International revenues continue to grow steadily. In content supply for streaming platforms, it ranks third globally. Among the world’s leading audiovisual exporters are, beyond the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and India itself — with France appearing in fifth place as the first non-English-speaking European country.
Why this matters for Brazil
Indian cinema is not strong by accident. It is strong because it was conceived, from the very beginning, as a tool of cultural sovereignty. Even before formal independence, India had already understood that contesting the imaginary is contesting power.
And it is perhaps not irrelevant that, at this very moment, Brazil is turning its eyes toward India on diplomatic and strategic agendas. The presidential trip to India, scheduled for February, takes place in a year when India assumes the presidency of BRICS — and when both countries seek to expand commercial and cultural exchanges as a way of building autonomy in the face of growing pressure and coercion from the United States.
The rapprochement between two major Global South countries should not be conceived solely in commercial or industrial terms, but in cultural ones as well. If the 21st century is defined by a fierce contest over narratives, platforms, and imaginaries, India shows that it is possible to combine cultural identity, technological mastery, and industrial structure. For Brazil — which still struggles to consolidate audiovisual hegemony at home — the dialogue with the Indian experience is not merely symbolic: it is strategic.
Sovereignty is not built with trade agreements alone, but with mastery of the narrative tools of one’s time.
